CHAPTER VI. 



NEW APPLICATIONS OF LIGHT SPECTKUM ANALYSIS. 



Far beyond Orion bright 



Cloud on cloud the star-haze lies ; 

 Million years bear down the light 



Earthward from those ghost-like eyes. 



F. T. Palgrave. 



Hushed be all earthly rhymes ! 



List to those spheral chimes 

 That echo down the singing vaults of night. 



The quivering impulse runs 



From the exultant suns, 

 Circling in endless harmonies of light. 



F. T. Mott. 



AMONG the numerous scientific discoveries of our cen- 

 tury we must give a very high, perhaps even the highest, 

 place to Spectrum Analysis. Not only because it has 

 completely solved the problem of the true nature and 

 cause of the various spectra produced by different kinds 

 of light, but because it has given us a perfectly new 

 engine of research, by which we are enabled to penetrate 

 into the remotest depths of space, and learn something of 

 the constitution and the motions of the constituent 

 bodies of the stellar universe. Through its means we 

 have acquired what are really the equivalents of new 

 senses, which give us knowledge that before seemed ab- 

 solutely and forever unattainable by man. 



The solar spectrum is that colored band produced by 

 allowing a sunbeam to pass through a prism, and a por- 

 tion of it is given by the dewdrop or the crystal when 



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